A GROWL FROM AUCKLAND.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 8446, 20 March 1889, Page 3

A GROWL FROM AUCKLAND.

(Fbom Our Own Correspondent.) Auckland, March 19.

The Herald remarks re the proposed Government grant to the Dunedin Exhibition : —"Tho promise of £10,000 by Ministers towards tho intended exhibition in Dunedin will take the colony by surprise, but Ministers themselves hava probably regarded it more from what is called in parliamentary slang a ' tactical' point of view than from auy other. In that light it is a move worthy of the tactical genius for which Sir Harry Atkinson is renowned. The Opposition will be certainly split, as it contains many Otago men and others who will be bound to this exhibition and to pledge the Opposition to carry ifc oufc if they succeeded in ejecting the Government and taking their places. To this pledge many in the Opposition would not consent, and between the two the Government will probably ride through the storms of the session. Of course there will be many in the present Government ranks little disposed to vote so large a sum of the taxpayers' money at the present time for such a purpose, but they will not votp against the Ministry as a whole, lest the unimproved land tax, or Sir George Grey, or some other great calamity fall upon the country. A merely local exhibition will thus bo turned to useful political purposes, as many a road, railway, cr bridge has been in the same way. For the last 15 or 16 years practice has made Sir Harry facile princeps in these matters, but there is a boldness and originality about the Dunedin grant while preaching retrenchment on all sides, whicb are not to be surpassed. The system which places an unlimited power of local expenditure in the hands of the General Government of the colony is responsible for these feats, which would otherwise be less practicable. The worst of it is that the Assembly seems conspjous of the evil, but utterly helpless to remove it. There must be something very rotten in the system, and an overwhelming need of some great change when this is so clearly the case."